Immigration Open Thread

Since this is the hot topic of the day and everyone seems to have their own take on it, some of us thought maybe you had some opinions worth sharing as well. Here’s the questions banging around on this end – How do we treat immigrants as a community? Should there be an amnesty? Should there be a wall? What’s too far, when it comes to legalization or amnesty? What do you think? Comments are open, go nuts.

7 Replies to “Immigration Open Thread”

There should be both a wall and amnesty. The borders need to be secured, but we can’t just throw millions of established people out of the country. America was built upon the policy of inclusion, not exclusion.

Mark how exactly will a wall secure our borders? Do you have any examples of walls in other countries that have worked?
Amnesty is a good concept, difficult to implement. How many people get amnesty? Which poll do we believe to obtain the numbers? How do we convince people to come forward to claim amnesty?
As a group, we treat immigrants like crap. Individually, most people recognize that we are all from other places at some point in our lineage and try to treat others with some degree of fairness, so long as it doesn’t effect our pocketbook or slow us down as we rush to the next consumer product on our list.
Unfortunately this is an issue that raises more questions than answers.

When I say “a wall” I mean some sort of border security; I don’t necessarily mean a giant slab of concrete. There needs to be some way of defending against a suitcase bomb being delivered from Canada or Mexico.

The problem we have with our border stems ultimately from the fact that we are in a relatively unique border situation.

Yes, there are other allegedly wealthy nations extremely near to other allegedly impoverished nations, but in no other place on earth can you literally WALK a hundred paces (or at all) to get to one from the other. Thus, the current ridiculously low barrier to entry, which is only compounded by having essentially NO demarcation or patrol of the border for swatches dozens of miles across in places.

This is compounded by the fact that you legally cannot hire illegal immigrants, which means that employers on the up and up ALREADY don’t want to deal with them, and no one will either report the ones they have or feel obligated to comply with labour laws with regard to these hires. Those not lucky enough to get sort of self-employed in service or under-the-table contracting tend to end up working below minimum wage on some farm somewhere. Prices stay low, which is all most of the PUBLIC cares about these days, and costs stay low, which is all most EMPLOYERS and BUILDERS care about these days.

Yes, we do need to stop any more of this from happening.

We do need to seriously enforce our border, and it may take a measure as severe as a thick physical barricade from the Pacific shore to the Rio Grande. And border agents who DON’T use hollow-tipped ammunition.

We do need to stop employers from hiring illegal immigrants, though a punishment as extreme or with as little flexibility as Austin’s is going to do more harm than good. An SSN or work visa ID sufficiently valid to pull off the background check that most employers do to not be in hot water ANYWAY is all we can expect employers to demand, and I’d even go so far as to start revoking charters (capital punishment for corporations) if the company can’t even manage that.

However, as illegal and potentially hazardous as the crossing into the US of as many people as have done so may be, we are ethically obligated not to completely destabilise the lives of somewhere on the order of TEN-MILLION people, many of which have been here for years; not a few of them for perhaps a decade or more. (If you try to count that out on fingers and toes, have three reams of paper to record your progress and four months you can waste.) So mass deportations are out of the question, and prison isn’t even worth discussing.

Ultimately, as BAFC23 pointed out, some form of amnesty is going to have to come down the pipe, though the degree and nature has yet to be determined, and is perhaps the single hardest question posed by the circumstances; it’s certainly one to which I don’t have any answers.